WAVES Releases Assets on the Testnet: A Novel Approach for Public Blockchains

The development of the Waves Platform continues to progress with a novel approach to asset issuance and trading currently being developed and tested on the Testnet. Waves assets combine scalability enhancements on a technical level with usability and versatility on a business level.

Better scalability is achieved through a simplified payment verification (SPV) scheme that is based on authenticated data structures. This allows users to store only the states of the top volume assets, and to update them using these SPV instead of storing the balance of all the tokens. This provides a great advantage in terms of storage, scalability, and performance, given that most of the assets issued will not be actively used.

Better performance and effectiveness, other than building on top of innovative Scorex framework and preparing its production ready version at the same time, will be achieved thanks to a combination of the DPOS and LPOS approaches. The Waves Team is also working with a cryptographer on the new approach for blockchain transaction confirmations. The Scientific paper and the LPOS paper will soon be available.

The Waves Platform, with its token being the “fuel” used for all operations, aims to be a decentralized Kickstarter and an instant and decentralized asset-to-asset exchange, supporting other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ether and national currencies like EUR, USD, YUAN at the same time. Fiat gateways, payment providers at first, will be issuing their fiat backed assets on the platform by themselves. Assets can represent services, stocks, real company shares with a built in dividend system that allows a company to make payments to investors with a click of a button in any currency, domestic or digital. All the main features will be available on Lite Client without the need to download or store the blockchain.

Instant asset-to-asset exchange will be one of the main features in the Waves Platform above standard operations, it allows users to trade assets without the interference of a third party service. While the order settlement itself is carried out on the blockchain, the Order Matching process is not, thus reducing the amount of data stored on the blockchain. Instead, Order Matching is carried out by a centralized service that charges a fee for the process. Order Matching stores states of orders, stats etc and will be available as an all-in-one package together with full nodes.

The user does not have to transfer any assets to exchange accounts to be able to trade. That’s why it’s impossible to steal assets from the exchange because the matcher doesn’t own client’s assets at any time. After the orders have been matched, the matching service creates a swap transaction and sends it to the both counterparties for signing. This scheme allows the Waves exchange to be as fast or faster than centralized exchanges, and much safer for the users.

Waves will allow the same extended functionality one would normally find only on a centralized exchange, like partial order matching, margin trading, the ability to save/restore the exchange’s state, the retrieval of all the market data via API, and a failure recovery mechanism. The same Waves Platform can be the engine for centralized exchanges to provide better security for their clients without losing any performance.

Waves will be the first production system being built on top of the Scorex framework, and the team has rewritten 80-90% of Scorex network layer to make it a near production ready system. Scorex framework is evolving at the same time, its development is lead by two great blockchain researchers, Alex Chepurnoy and Dmitry Meshkov. Waves will be supporting this great development and will most probably evolve together with it further in the future.

The hackathon hosted to discover and eliminate bugs in the full node code is currently ongoing. All of the newly discovered issues are being addressed on a daily basis leading to more stable and secure network.